Devaluing the Gold Bar

[CMonkey]

Given how things seem to frequently have costs like 1/12, 1/4, 1/3, 1/6 of a gold bar and generate either 2/3 or 1/3 of a gold bar per season, wouldn't it be sensible to just multiply everything by 12 and say a gold bar is worth 200 crowns for finance purposes?

Other than legacy, is there any other real reason to have it worth 2000gp?

CM.

[Birthright-L]

From: "CMonkey" <brnetboard@TUARHIEVEL.ORG>

> Other than legacy, is there any other real reason to have it worth
2000gp?
>

I guess the reason is political - it is the only thing we can agree on!

= )

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[AnakinMiller]

I would personally like to see the system remove the 1/12, 1/4, 1/3, 1/6 of
a gold bar. That is far to cumbersome and clunky. The system should be
over hauled to use .1, .2, .3, etc of a gold bar.

-Anakin Miller
-------------------------
"What was sundered, shall be remade.
What was stolen, shall be avenged. "
- Engraved on the Crown of Diemed

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[Trevyr]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Birthright Roleplaying Game Discussion
> [mailto:BIRTHRIGHT-L@ORACLE.WIZARDS.COM]On Behalf Of CMonkey

> Other than legacy, is there any other real reason to have
> it worth 2000gp?


You mean other than having to rewrite the whole economy system and price
values? Do you really think that 200gp/GB is realistic given what a GB buys?
I can understand perhaps reducing it to 1000 gp to ease computation
(although I personally don`t find using 2000 all that difficult), but I seem
to remember someone arguing once that based on what a GB buys, it actually
should be worth something like 5000 gp.

Of course, I`m also of the opinion that the purchasing power of 1 gp in
Faerun or Oerth should be about equal to 2 sp in Cerilia, which means that 1
GB (2000 gp Cerilian) would buy you about 10,000 gp worth of goods and
services out of the PHB. And that`s even MORE complicated.

Mark V.

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[CMonkey]

Originally posted by Trevyr
You mean other than having to rewrite the whole economy system and price
values? Do you really think that 200gp/GB is realistic given what a GB buys?


No, that's completely missing the point. I mean multiply everything by 12; so a shipyard will cost 48 gold bars per level, a ferry will cost 12, a highway in the plains will cost 24 GB and so on. Thus the maintainance for a ferry is now 1 GB instead of 1/12, law holdings generate 4 GB a season per level and so forth. Nothings actual cost has changed at all.

The other stuff would be complex to do, this would be not.

CM.

[Nikolai II]

'Mini-Goldbars' could work for some, and if you called them 'Tradebars' you could use them in conjunction with goldbars, and not need change a thing.:)

edit:Then you could claim that TBs are worth 200 and GBs 2400.

[irdeggman]

See the description of what a GB is in the playtest document. It is an abstract. It is not supposed to reflect strictly money but also goods and other things that are of value. This was a subject discussed on the discussion boards for quite some time, as I recall.

The fractions are of course hard to deal with easily and should definitely be looked at in more detail.:)

[ecliptic]

I agree with CMonkey.

Having smaller gold bars makes sense even ingame terms. Why have heavy gold bars you got to keep cutting in half when you could just have smaller gold bars. :)

[irdeggman]

Originally posted by ecliptic


I agree with CMonkey.

Having smaller gold bars makes sense even ingame terms. Why have heavy gold bars you got to keep cutting in half when you could just have smaller gold bars. :)

See the description of what a GB is in the playtest document. It is an abstract. It is not supposed to reflect strictly money but also goods and other things that are of value. This was a subject discussed on the discussion boards for quite some time, as I recall.

[ecliptic]

Whats the point in bringing BR to D20 if noone ever wants to improve anything?

[irdeggman]

Originally posted by ecliptic

Whats the point in bringing BR to D20 if noone ever wants to improve anything?

What are you refering to exactly?

What I was pointing out was that a GB shouldn't be considered to be a solid chunck of gold. This was discussed for a long time on the discussion boards. By not considering it a solid chunck of gold but rather an aggregate of commodities and money this is indeed an improvement and makes sense from a medieval setting standpoint where many things were bought with barter and trade goods.

[ecliptic]

I mean it should be wrote up as a big chunk of gold that players can carry in their backpack aswell as a king can spend it on supplies. :)

[ConjurerDragon]

ecliptic wrote:

>This post was generated by the Birthright.net message forum.
> You can view the entire thread at: http://www.birthright.net/read.php?TID=1504
>ecliptic wrote:
> I agree with CMonkey.
>Having smaller gold bars makes sense even ingame terms. Why have heavy gold bars you got to keep cutting in half when you could just have smaller gold bars. :)
>
I thought there are no Gold Bars existing as gold bars, but only as a
matter to put a value on a large amount of stuff, like grain in silos?
Really nothing else than a letter of credit saying "2000 gp worth of
tools, weapons and whatever" = 1 Gold Bar.
bye
Michael Romes

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[DanMcSorley]

On Thu, 17 Apr 2003, ecliptic wrote:
> Whats the point in bringing BR to D20 if noone ever wants to improve
> anything?

It`s a conversion. It`s supposed to retain the trappings and feel of the
original. And most of the radical changes you are proposing (for
instance, doing away with bloodlines) aren`t viewed as improvements by
anyone but yourself.
--
Communication is possible only between equals.
Daniel McSorley- mcsorley@cis.ohio-state.edu

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[ConjurerDragon]

ecliptic wrote:

>This post was generated by the Birthright.net message forum.
> You can view the entire thread at: http://www.birthright.net/read.php?TID=1504
>ecliptic wrote:
> I mean it should be wrote up as a big chunk of gold that players can carry in their backpack aswell as a king can spend it on supplies. :)
>
This would make sense in that it would allow regents to steal treasure
of another regent with an espionage action, or some rogues to sneak into
the treasure chamber to carry off some heavy bars of gold.

However it would as much be possible to steal a silo full of grain or a
herd of cattle, considering that an action is a month of time.
bye
Michael Romes

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[ecliptic]

Only the most desperate would steal grain or cows. Especially when they could steal gold, much easier to carry away at that. :)

[irdeggman]

Originally posted by ecliptic

Only the most desperate would steal grain or cows. Especially when they could steal gold, much easier to carry away at that. :)

But not as useful if one is trying to feed a starving community.

Also in 2nd ed BR they (the authors) made it a big point to reflect that GBs are not used as direct currency, which is why it took a Finance action to convert GB into gp which could be spent. This is one of the reasons that the BR community had gone to the general consensus that a GB was not a bar of gold but more of an abstract unit of measure of wealth that could be spent on the domain level.

The other question is if one stole a bar of gold - where would one spend it? Most establishments wouldn't have enough goods or money to make any change and wouldn't be able to "get rid" of the bar after they acquired it.

[ryancaveney]

On Fri, 18 Apr 2003, ecliptic wrote:

> Only the most desperate would steal grain or cows. :)

On the level of a province regent, perhaps. But I suspect the various
clans and tribes of the Rjurik and Khinasi nomads, and all the Vos and
goblins, spend a great deal of time stealing each other`s livestock --
that`s just what mobile wealth is in an agricultural society. If you
adventure in such a place, and have any connection to the community you
live among, you are almost certainly a part-time cattle rustler. Many
regents in those lands will have been on cattle raids in their youth, and
may still occasionally lead them as part of their duties of rulership.


Ryan Caveney

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[Airgedok]

Originally posted by irdeggman






Originally posted by ecliptic


I agree with CMonkey.

Having smaller gold bars makes sense even ingame terms. Why have heavy gold bars you got to keep cutting in half when you could just have smaller gold bars. :)

See the description of what a GB is in the playtest document. It is an abstract. It is not supposed to reflect strictly money but also goods and other things that are of value. This was a subject discussed on the discussion boards for quite some time, as I recall.



Seeing as the GB is abstract there is therefore no reason NOT to times everything by 12 and make bookkeeping purely integere based. The value of the bar is of no concequence. in the book keeping phase of things the only thing that need to be addressed is how much "cash" a GB trnaslates to when a regent coverts GB in to gold pieces or gp into gold bars.
Therefore by saying a GB is worth 200 gp and that if the finance option is used then a regent can covert 50 GB + 10 GB per level of guild has no change in the game, Except to ease book keeping.

This is a possitive change as there is no hassel gealing with non similar fractions.

[Birthright-L]

> ecliptic wrote:
> Only the most desperate would steal grain or cows. :)
>

There is no need to be desperate in order to steal cattle.

Cattle-raiding was considered a honorable noble occupation during the early
middle ages. From Ireland to Arabia, it was a universal and accepted way for
a poor noble or tribe to gain wealth and/or status.

Grain is more of a problem, since it can`t walk by itself. Plundered grain
is more useful as supplies for an advancing army. Large-scale grain
shipments over more than local areas can only be done by ship.

/Carl

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[ryancaveney]

On Sun, 20 Apr 2003, Airgedok wrote:

> Seeing as the GB is abstract there is therefore no reason NOT to times
> everything by 12 and make bookkeeping purely integer based. The value
> of the bar is of no consequence.

There is definitely something to this. Twelfths, sixteenths and such
are a nuisance to work with. Even the largely non-metric US has metric
money. =)

But note, just multiplying by twelve might not be enough! If the draft
revision uses several different fractions in different places (I haven`t
read every single page yet), or even worse multiplies them, then to keep
all those relative values the same but work only with integers, you`d have
to multiply everything by the lowest common denominator of every fraction
in the whole thing, which could easily be 720 or more.

I personally use, and others have suggested, a slight variation of this
scheme, keeping GB as they are but retaining decimal fractions: 0.08 is
almost a twelfth, but more straightforward in computation. This approach
is also adopted by the Sierra computer game: since in the Move Troops
action, the rulebook says spending 1 GB allows you to move 10
unit-provinces (in your own domain), if you move 23 unit-provinces the
computer charges you 2.3 GB, not 3.

There is really no practical difference between these ideas -- the only
question is an aesthetic one: whether you want regents` treasuries to be
usually hundreds and sometimes thousands, and usually spend money in
multiples of 10 or 12 (or 240!); or stay at apparently smaller numbers but
sometimes spend less than 1 GB in a way that maintains a constant, small
number of significant digits. In scientific notation, the two would look
identical, except for the exponent.


Ryan Caveney

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[Hallur]

Why change this at all. It is not like it is harder to calculat frations like 1/3 than points like 0.333. In fact it is mutch easyer becouse the howl sistem is made up of the frations.
I like this way around things. It keeps the calculations simple for me, I don´t have to use a computer liek I would if I hade to do if I was working with alot of 0.25 +0.33 and so on.
In the case of the move army example that was used here abouw, to move one unit one province, you have to pay what 1/6? or some thing, then you just find out how many units you move how many provinces and ue that number alot simpler than calculating back and forth all night.
I was wery happy when I saw this modifacation, and I and me group use it with eas now, I will admit that we had some small dificultys at first becouse we were so out of proctice working with numbers like this but now after just 2 setions or some thing, things are happening mutch faster.

ANd if we would multyply every thing with 12 like posted, will not that bad an idea I think that we would get illutioned be the amout of gold we have and it would couse a big problem in it self. Jsut like when you have a realy big inflation maney tends to lose some of its value. So I think we sould lose some of the exitement doing that.